Top 5 things we learnt at Atlassian Summit 2019 in Las Vegas

by GLiNTECH

This year’s Atlassian Summit was held in Las Vegas and the GLiNTECH team made the trek across the globe to attend. This year’s Summit event was mainly focused on major improvements across the Atlassian product suite, as well as recent acquisitions.

Here are the top 5 announcements our team found interesting:

Data Center features and functionality to be rolled out in the future

Atlassian revealed their intention to improve performance across their Data Center products with a number of features and future rollouts announced. These include:

Support for Amazon Aurora: Atlassian will be enhancing one of the core promises of Data Center, high availability, by introducing support for Amazon Aurora. Products included in these changes: Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, Bitbucket

CDN Support: To help improve performance for distributed teams, Atlassian are introducing CDN support. By enabling CDN support, customers can accelerate the experience of their remote users' as they interact with the UI of the core products, and reduce peak load on their primary application instances. Customers will be able to use any CDN including AWS CloudFront. Products included in these changes: Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, Bitbucket

Smart Mirror Farms: Smart Mirror Farms will meet enterprise customers' increasing number of builds and clones, increasing merge and deployment frequency, and their adoption of additional developer tools like resource intensive CI/CD across our enterprise customer’s development teams. Products included in these changes: Bitbucket

Rate limiting for REST APIs: Customers can experience performance degradation or outages due to a number of factors. To help customers better protect their instances, Atlassian are allowing customers to set thresholds for the number of requests allowed in a specific time frame. This solution will target REST API usage specifically. Atlassian realises this isn’t the only place where customers see user abuse, so they will be continuing to invest in helping customers self-protect their instances and are looking to add similar support in Jira Software and Jira Service Desk in the future. Products included in these changes: Bitbucket

Individual Issue Archiving: Since the announcement of Project Archiving last year, Atlassian have had other ideas to help customers manage old data. Archiving whole projects can be too broad, especially for customers who have large or long-lived projects. For our Jira Service Desk customers, project archiving doesn’t always make sense because it can mean you need to archive an entire service desk. This is why Atlassian are introducing Issue Archiving. Customers will be able to archive individual issues, use JQL queries to collect and archive issues as a bulk action or use the API that will be released with it. Products included in these changes: Jira Software & Jira Service Desk

Hardware configuration recommendations - prescriptive guidance: You may have noticed that Atlassian started publishing more prescriptive guidance over the past year like node sizing performance testing frameworks and much more. Soon, they’ll also be adding hardware configurations to the list. Choosing the right infrastructure set up for a Data Center deployment is not a trivial task, no matter the size of the organisation. To help customers with this process, Atlassian are creating several reference guides based on of hundreds of performance tests across a variety of instance types. All of these tests were run on AWS compute-optimised Virtual Machines. They will help customers determine the best choice for their organisation by showing how different setups impact different factors like performance, reliability, and cost. Products included in these changes: Jira Software, Confluence, Bitbucket

Updates to Data Center AWS & Azure Templates: Updates have been made to every single one of Atlassian’s AWS and Azure templates which means improved support and they are simpler to set up and customise for their specific needs. Products included in these changes: Jira, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, Bitbucket

Centralised license and permissions visibility: Crowd has been extended and will enable centralised license visibility to allow users to keep track of various licenses. Admins will also be able to track licensing permissions across Atlassian software pieces.

Cloud is also the Future

Atlassian is preparing to launch a raft of new features designed to help users get the most out of their Cloud products, in 2019. This is important - around ninety percent of Atlassian customers tend to start on an Atlassian Cloud product. These new announcements include:

The launch of the new Atlassian Cloud Migration Center to support moving to the Cloud

Cloud Premium and better analytics for Confluence Cloud

Atlassian introduced a new offering called Cloud Premium for Jira Software and Confluence. Jira Software Premium includes features that enhance the way teams build roadmaps, manage team capacity, and communicate plans and progress.

Confluence Cloud Premium provides new features for administrators who need more control and visibility over what’s happening in their Confluence instance, such as analytics and the ability to easily debug permission issues. The acquisition of Good Software was also revealed during Summit. Good Software is an organisation focused on making analytics tools for users and admins of Confluence and as such, extended analytics were one of 15 new features announced for Confluence Cloud. Users are now able to view how others engage with their content. Cloud Premium will also include unlimited file storage, and data encryption by default.

GLiNTECH are experienced experts in Atlassian migrations.

Contact our consultants to get started.

Atlassian are serious about both top down and bottom up digital transformations

After the acquisition of AgileCraft earlier in the year, Atlassian have officially rebranded Jira Align as a new product.

Jira Align provides a new perspective on transformations, offering businesses a holistic overview of what each team is working on, as well as an understanding of the reasoning behind each action. This means effective support for top down, bottom up, and middle out digital transformations, demonstrating Atlassian's commitment to flexibility and efficacy during transformative phases.

On release, this will only be made available to Server and Data Centre users. However, the announcement reinforces how serious Atlassian is about the digital transformations of their users, so we can expect further support for this in the future. Atlassian has already made a wealth of resources available to users so that they are able to quickly and easily incorporate the new Jira Align product into their own digital transformation initiatives. For more information visit: https://agilecraft.com/

Legal teams and other business teams are ditching Excel for Jira

During one of the breakout sessions at Summit, the legal team at PBS Distribution upgraded their processes and stopped using Excel. Leaving behind clunky tools in favour of Jira enabled their business to achieve operational consistency, increased user adoption (thanks to intuitive processes within Jira) and improved the organisation's overall transparency, efficiency and efficacy. This is something that is particularly exciting for GLiNTECH, as we've been working with clients to help them streamline their processes through automation. Click here to find out more: https://www.glintech.com/atlassian-for-business/legal.

For a complete list of all the sessions, you can watch it through the Atlassian Summit website. GLiNTECH can assist with any product demo and Atlassian configuration, feel free to reach out to our team